It's the oldest trick in the book: disarm your enemies with faux-dumbness and then stab 'em in the back while they're making fun of you—and also rake in some cold hard cash while you're at it. Today's USA Today fluffernutter sandwich about 55-year-old Cosmo girl Kate White is an object lesson in how this is done. On the "dumb blonde" front: "Cover lines on Cosmo are paramount, because they help sell, in a good month, 2 million copies on newsstands alone. On the upcoming August cover, which she's still massaging, White points to one—'Erotic sex!'—that she says is a grabber. 'We've used the word 'sex' in a lot of combinations, but we've never said 'erotic sex' before. I like the idea of the reader going, 'Oooh, erotic sex,' 'White says, a gleam in her eye." Heh. But watch out! This lady is actually sharpening her knives when you think she's sharpening her eyeliner pencil. Oh: and sticking them into Bonnie Fuller.

In Over Her Dead Body, White's previous Weggins caper, the victim is the hilariously portrayed Mona Hodges, much-reviled editor of Buzz. Though White has never worked at a celeb rag, she says she is fascinated by that pressure-cooker world, where it's not much of a stretch to imagine that overworked underlings might want to bump off the boss.

And no, Mona Hodges was not modeled on Bonnie Fuller, she of the fearsome reputation who now edits Star.

So is it a coincidence that Mona's boss in Dead Body was named Tom Dicker, which sounds an awful lot like Fuller's boss, David Pecker? "Must have been a Freudian slip," White says with a smile.